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<h1>LuaJIT</h1>
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<a class="current" href="luajit.html">LuaJIT</a>
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<p>
LuaJIT is a <b>Just-In-Time Compiler</b> for the Lua<sup>*</sup>
programming language.
</p>
<p>
LuaJIT is Copyright &copy; 2005-2011 Mike Pall.
LuaJIT is open source software, released under the
<a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;MIT license</a>.
</p>
<p class="indent" style="color: #606060;">
* Lua is a powerful, dynamic and light-weight programming language
designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a
general-purpose, stand-alone language. More information about
Lua can be found at: <a href="http://www.lua.org/"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;http://www.lua.org/</a>
</p>
<h2>Compatibility</h2>
<p>
LuaJIT implements the full set of language features defined by Lua 5.1.
The virtual machine (VM) is <b>API- and ABI-compatible</b> to the
standard Lua interpreter and can be deployed as a drop-in replacement.
</p>
<p>
LuaJIT offers more performance, at the expense of portability. It
currently runs on all popular operating systems based on
<b>x86</b> or <b>x64</b> CPUs (Linux, Windows, OSX etc.) or embedded
systems based on <b>ARM</b> (Android, iOS) or <b>PPC</b> CPUs.
Other platforms will be supported in the future, based on user demand
and sponsoring.
</p>

<h2>Overview</h2>
<p>
LuaJIT has been successfully used as a <b>scripting middleware</b> in
games, 3D modellers, numerical simulations, trading platforms and many
other specialty applications. It combines high flexibility with high
performance and an unmatched <b>low memory footprint</b>: less than
<b>125K</b> for the VM plus less than <b>85K</b> for the JIT compiler (on x86).
</p>
<p>
LuaJIT has been in continuous development since 2005. It's widely
considered to be <b>one of the fastest dynamic language
implementations</b>. It has outperformed other dynamic languages on many
cross-language benchmarks since its first release &mdash; often by a
substantial margin. In 2009 other dynamic language VMs started to catch up
with the performance of LuaJIT 1.x. Well, I couldn't let that slide. ;-)
</p>
<p>
2009 also marks the first release of the long-awaited <b>LuaJIT 2.0</b>.
The whole VM has been rewritten from the ground up and relentlessly
optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed interpreter,
written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler.
</p>
<p>
An innovative <b>trace compiler</b> is integrated with advanced,
SSA-based optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This
allows a substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic
language features.
</p>
<p>
It's destined to break into the <a href="http://luajit.org/performance.html"><span class="ext">&raquo;</span>&nbsp;performance</a>
range traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.
</p>

<h2>More ...</h2>
<p>
Click on the LuaJIT sub-topics in the navigation bar to learn more
about LuaJIT.
</p>
<p><p>
Click on the Logo in the upper left corner to visit
the LuaJIT project page on the web. All other links to online
resources are marked with a '<span class="ext">&raquo;</span>'.
</p>
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